BEYOND STATIC DECOYS: A POSITION PAPER ON REINFORCEMENT-LEARNING- DRIVEN HONEYGAN ECOSYSTEMS WITH BLOCKCHAIN-ANCHORED AUDIT TRAILS FOR INDUSTRY 5.0 CYBER DEFENSE
Department of Computer Application Echelon Institute of Technology, Faridabad Affiliated to Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University New Delhi, India
Recent work on Generative Adversarial Networks for honeypot generation, most notably the HoneyGAN Pots framework, has shown that decoys produced by a learned generator can evade existing honeypot detectors more reliably than hand-crafted ones. That result is encouraging, but it is only a first step. A trained generator still produces decoys that are static after training: it does not learn from how attackers actually behave once the decoys are deployed, it provides no tamper-proof record of what it generated, and it assumes a class of compute resources that does not exist on industrial edge nodes. This paper is a position paper that takes the future-work agenda outlined by Gabrys et al. and develops it into a concrete research design. We propose an integrated framework, HoneyGAN+, that couples a conditional GAN to a reinforcement-learning policy trained on observed attacker engagement, anchors every generated decoy on a permissioned blockchain to give responders a verifiable audit trail, and uses knowledge distillation together with federated learning to push inference onto resource-constrained Industry 5.0 endpoints. We further argue that individual decoys should be replaced by coordinated multi-agent ecosystems whose internal references are mutually consistent, and we propose a standardized evaluation pipeline (detection resistance, engagement, longevity, and intelligence value) to make claims comparable across studies. The paper also discusses dual-use risks and a governance model that, in our view, ought to be developed before broad deployment rather than after. We are explicit throughout: the contribution is a research design with enough technical detail to support implementation, not a fully built and benchmarked system.
Kumar, R. & Hassija, S. (2026). Beyond Static Decoys: A Position Paper on Reinforcement-Learning- Driven Honeygan Ecosystems with Blockchain-Anchored Audit Trails for Industry 5.0 Cyber Defense. International Journal of Science, Strategic Management and Technology, 02(05). https://doi.org/10.55041/ijsmt.v2i5.247
Kumar, Rohit, and Shallu Hassija. "Beyond Static Decoys: A Position Paper on Reinforcement-Learning- Driven Honeygan Ecosystems with Blockchain-Anchored Audit Trails for Industry 5.0 Cyber Defense." International Journal of Science, Strategic Management and Technology, vol. 02, no. 05, 2026, pp. . doi:https://doi.org/10.55041/ijsmt.v2i5.247.
Kumar, Rohit, and Shallu Hassija. "Beyond Static Decoys: A Position Paper on Reinforcement-Learning- Driven Honeygan Ecosystems with Blockchain-Anchored Audit Trails for Industry 5.0 Cyber Defense." International Journal of Science, Strategic Management and Technology 02, no. 05 (2026). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.55041/ijsmt.v2i5.247.
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